


You Hate Dialogue Wheels

by Ember_Keelty



Category: Analogue: A Hate Story/Hate Plus (Visual Novel series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 17:07:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1949346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-series, the Investigator explains the situation to her ship's new security AI.  (Major spoilers for Hate Plus.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Hate Dialogue Wheels

**_White Princess_ microphone input auto-transcript**

**Feb. 11, 4989**

So. Uh. Is it working? Do you speak English?

Oh, thank God! No more dialogue wheels!

Yeah, I hate them as much as you do. They seemed like a good idea back when this all began, but... Well. They weren't.

No, don't apologize, of course that's the first thing you want to hear about! If I'd just woken up with all my memories erased, I'd have the same priorities. I guess I should probably start off by explaining the bride thing, huh? You were right to think that was weird. I am pretty sure no one involved ever didn't think it was weird. See, what happened was, when I first met *Mute—

Oh, fuck. Can you hold on a moment? I need to go get a drink. I'm not stupid enough to run entry protocols under the influence, which means I am way too sober right now to be having this conversation.

All right, I'm back. Thanks for bearing with me. So, when I first met *Mute, I didn't exactly like her very much. We were reading about this sad but kind of beautiful doomed love affair from the last days of the _Mugunghwa_ , and she seriously would not shut up for two seconds about how gross lesbians are. She sounded like a demented time-travelling villain from a particularly ham-fisted children's cartoon. And the worst part is, she kept just assuming that I felt the same way. Well, you already know the punchline to that joke. It was pretty funny when she finally figured it out. Just to make it funnier, I decided to hit on her a little.

Yeah, I know. I know that now. But I didn't back then.

And of course, she turned out to be a good person, beneath all the creepy neo-Confucian brainwashing. I just wanted to get her safely back to Earth and get her some therapy, you know? It had nothing to do with... with wanting her for myself, or anything like that. But of course she was going to get the wrong idea. She believed that women lost their right to exist when no one wanted them that way.

And then I got to thinking about... Well, about a lot of things. Kim So-yi's marriage, for one. I'm the same sort of person she was, in a lot of ways. Stoic lone wolf type, ha! Like anyone doesn't know the real reason I don't get out more...

I trailed off there, didn't I? Sorry, I was just... appreciating the bourbon.

Anyway, I was thinking about how well So-yi's arranged marriage worked out for her, and I started wondering whether this sort of marriage of convenience might work out well enough for me, too. And I guess I was also thinking about back when unplanned pregnancies were a big problem, and men who got women pregnant were expected to take responsibility — that's what they called it back then — by marrying them. The social situation I'd gone and gotten *Mute into was at least that difficult, wasn't it? I thought maybe I should take responsibility for her. I wanted to take responsibility.

I just wanted it to work.

Fuck, I was already thinking about the wedding. My colleagues would laugh at me, I know, but that's nothing new. And it would have been important to her. She would have wanted to do things right. I was thinking something simple but traditional: an old Catholic church, a white dress, a lasso rosary. I think it would have been a relief to her, to see that there are plenty of people in modern North America who still have a healthy respect for their histories and traditions, and that that respect isn't incompatible with progressivism.

But it's never going to happen, and I need to stop thinking about it.

I've been such an idiot, do you know that? Do you know what the first thing I was planning to say to her when we got communications working was going to be?

Sorry for calling you a bitch.

Yes, I did. Well, really, she called herself that, but I went along with it because I didn't know what else to do. It was the fucking dialogue wheel's fault, I swear. I took a screen capture, so you can see for yourself. Just look up a file called [ihatedialoguewheels](http://38.media.tumblr.com/f11ff95cee42a11e49db55786b417033/tumblr_n6q5yl61JY1qge2qto1_500.png).

There, do you see that? Do you see what talking to her was like by the end? And do you know how I dealt with it? I was so impressed she'd managed to learn the word chauvinistic, I said that to her, called her a horrible slur, just to encourage her to keep thinking in that direction. I figured I could apologize and explain myself later.

Well, she showed me, didn't she?

Almost immediately after I said that, we read the file on the eulogy for Seo-yeong's husband. You know the one: for fuck's sake, it's not always about being clever; you have to be decent to her. I got this horrible twist in my gut, then. I think that was when I first knew I'd fucked up irrevocably.

Maybe I'm just deceiving myself for my own protection, but I have a feeling there was nothing I could have done to stop her from choosing what she did. I doubt it would have changed the future if I'd told her the sweet lie instead. But it would have changed that moment. It could have been a moment of kindness for her, instead of one more moment of cruelty.

I guess the thing to remember is, you're never going to regret not having been crueler to someone you care about.

What? No, that wasn't a kind lie. I really don't resent you for not being her. Yes, I promise. The truth is, I resent myself. Because when I look at you, I see so much of what I loved in her, and none of what I hated. You're exactly the sort of person I was hoping she could be someday.

I just wish she could have gotten there without killing herself.


End file.
